Avoiding wiki spam in Mediawiki


The great thing about Wiki’s is that everyone can edit them. The problem is that this attracts a new strain of spam morons: the wiki spammers. My Tango Wiki has gotten spammed several times per day since I launched it. A page gets changed to a list of URLs for various drugs, mostly ‘male performance related’, let’s say.

A sample of the IP addresses of the offenders (basically all over the place):

They try to hide the spam by putting it inside a <div style="height: 1px"> (CSS hidden spam) so they are not visible to visitors, but get picked up by Google anyway. The goal, just as with splogs, is to create Google juice, not to get read or clicked on.

The ways to fight this abuse are based on the following techniques:

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💬 spam